


Divergence

by DaneelsSoul, shadow_wasserson



Series: Building From Scratch [2]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alcoholism, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Future Character Death, Gen, Meteorstuck, Prophetic Visions, mentions of Dave/Terezi - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-17
Updated: 2016-04-17
Packaged: 2018-06-01 17:16:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,065
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6528880
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DaneelsSoul/pseuds/DaneelsSoul, https://archiveofourown.org/users/shadow_wasserson/pseuds/shadow_wasserson
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>GC: ROS3 H4S B33N FR3TT1NG OV3R NOT KNOW1NG HOW TH3 M3T3OR GOT OFF COURS3.<br/>GC: 1 DONT KNOW 3V3RYTH1NG TH4T H4PP3N3D. 1 H4V3 FR4GM3NTS, THOUGH, 4ND...<br/>WV: ...?<br/>GC: L3T M3 T3LL YOU HOW 1T M1GHT H4V3 H4PP3N3D.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Seering Light

**Author's Note:**

> Act 0 of Building from Scratch
> 
> Note that years are measured from entry into the medium. Thus, this takes place about 3 months before Act 1.

**Mid November, Year 1 of Sweep 2**

Your name is Rose Lalonde and you are sitting alone in the dark. Your separation from your aspect helps to dim your visions, but unfortunately the shape of things to come has already seared itself into your brain. You've spent so long rummaging through possible futures, trying to find a path to victory. Something, anything, that you could do to avert the looming darkness. Unfortunately, it appears that there is no such course to be found.

Over the past year you have seen the world destroyed over and over. In some timelines, Jack catches up with you. His powers invariably prove impossible to overcome, despite your best efforts, and the asteroid is annihilated along with all who inhabit it long before your destination can be reached. This, admittedly, has shown itself to be an unlikely outcome. A nasty one to be sure, but relatively painless compared to some of the grimmer alternatives. In some futures you meet your end at the hands of the challenges found in the new session. In many you find a cunning plan, a fearsome weapon, or a loyal army with which to combat Lord English. But every time, the plan fails, the weapon breaks and the army shatters in the face of the demon. And every time you can do naught but watch helplessly as he murders them. The trolls. John. Dave. Kanaya. And you. You cannot hope to prevail against one who derives his power from the very forces of inevitability itself. You have seen futures where you try to flee, leaving the rest of creation to perish in order to save your own skins. But it is never long before the demon finds you. In all your searching you have found but a single means of survival, and despite the pain and effort that went into finding this singular escape, you dearly wish that you had never encountered it. For your salvation, the only path out of millions that will leave you breathing by year's end, is to accept perhaps the grimmest fate of all- surrender. An eternity of wretched servitude, watching helplessly as the Lord of Time devours the crumbling pillars and reality and slaughters all who have ever lived there. You shudder at the memory of those visions.

Your foreknowledge has made your life a waking nightmare. Your friends' smiles bring forth ghastly images of their coming deaths and their laughter only brings echoes of the demon's screeching cries to your head. Your companions sing, and eat, and bicker playfully with one another, and through it all you dearly long to join them, but your knowledge looms in the air before you like soot, slowly suffocating you and draining the levity from your spirit.

And yet, for their sake you try. You fill reams of paper with doomed plans for your coming trials. You help build arching monuments out of cans. You snipe playfully back and forth with Dave. You put on a mask of normalcy so that your friends might live out these last few months of theirs in peace, unburdened by the futures that plague your dreams. Fate will have its way with them soon enough anyway.

Only Kanaya seems to catch glimpses of the darkness concealed behind your face. You can sense her worry for you even though she is too polite to say anything about it. You can hardly bear that pain that she must feel for you, and would pay nearly any price to relieve her of this burden. But you cannot do it. It is selfish of you, but you cannot make yourself give up the one person that has provided you with any joy in these last few months.

Your head swirls and you can feel the visions beginning to return despite the gloomy ambiance. It is too much. Tomorrow you will try again. Play your part in this grand tragedy. Put on a show for the others so that you may preserve their innocence for one more day. Try to come to terms with your own imminent death. Revise your plans and hope that somehow this time things will be different. Perhaps tomorrow you will finally do the impossible and plot a course around the looming disaster. But such thoughts are just another mockery, for deep in your soul you know that there is nothing that can be done. Yes, tomorrow you will somehow make it through another day, but right now you no longer have the strength to fight. And so, as you sit alone in the bowels of the asteroid, you raise the bottle again to your lips, and take another drink.


	2. Offshoot

**Mid November, Year 1 of Sweep 2**

Your name is Rose Lalonde, and you are sitting alone in a dimly lit room. Your head is swimming and your mouth is stale with the taste of alcohol, but it isn't enough. Visions still crowd your head. The demon's screech as he consigns worlds and galaxies to fire. Your friends' desperate struggle against him. Dave. Kanaya. Karkat. Haunted. Mangled. Broken. Dead. Dead. Dead. Over and over and over as the seer within you searches desperately for a path to victory. You want to run, but the demon will destroy everything if unstopped. The visions are getting worse as you approach your destination, and you can't deal with it. 

You slap your arm on the table in front of you, and fumble around until it bumps up against the bottle. You grasp desperately at the container, and pull it to your lips. You tilt your head back to accept more of its nectar of forgetfulness. You suck desperately on the glass, but nothing comes. Empty. You growl in frustration and hurl the bottle into a nearby wall. It shatters satisfyingly on the rock, and glass tumbles to the ground. You feel something hot and sudden against your cheek, and when your hand instinctively reaches up to feel it, it comes away slick with blood.

You stare numbly at your hand as you feel the blood beginning to trickle down your neck. You don't know how long you stand there, trying to remember what to do, but the room begins to brighten and you hear Kanaya's voice rapidly approaching and filled with worry.

"Rose? Have you been consuming more of your human soporifics? Rose? Dear, you appear to be bleeding..."

She continues to fuss over you, but your attention is drawn by shards of glass surrounding you that glisten in her light. The glow dances between the shards casting tiny rainbows here and there. They remind you of the pastel oceans of the Land of Light and Rain. The world that you knew for only a day, but yet somehow knew had always been a part of you. Your home. Shattered to pieces on the floor. The islands cracked to pieces. The oceans drained of color. The turtles slaughtered. Everything ripped apart and left-

"Rose?"

Kanaya is gently tugging on you, trying to bring you out of the room.

"Rose, let someone else take care of it."

Unfortunately, there is no one else to take care of Lord English. Your sight is needed, and unlike Dave you can't simply create more of yourself, and even that would require making a bunch of doomed timelines. Worlds where other copies would just sit out the fight on the sidelines. Worlds where you could just let the main timeline take care of it.

You struggle to muster your thoughts through the cloud of alcohol. This would do it. You could pawn off your work on some other Rose and have a chance to live without this constant worry. A part of you worries that this is irresponsible. Dooming the timeline surely will not help, but you shove this voice aside, grasping at your newly found hope. You need to do this now, before you lose your nerve. You just need to find a way to fracture the timeline, a way to base your actions on chance so that they could go either way. As a Seer of Light, you could predict a simple coin flip, you'll need something-

"Rose?" Kanaya again. She seems to have lead you out into the hallway before you stopped to think. "It is only a little bit further. Please come with me."

"Kananaya?" You turn to face her, "Heds or tailsh?" you slur.

"Rose? I am not sure that I understand what you are asking."

You focus on her trying hard to enunciate despite your limited control. "P-pick one. He-eadz orr T-ails."

"Rose why-" you stare at her pleadingly "Tails, I suppose."

You are filled with relief. You sag forward, supporting yourself on Kanaya's shoulders.

"Rose, please. We need to get that cut looked at." She begins to guide you more forcefully than before. You have work to do though. You try to pull away, but she is stronger than you and much better coordinated. Kanaya continues to herd you towards your room. You need a way out. You struggle for a plan, and somehow one comes to you. You lean in to kiss her. You miss your intended target instead planting one sloppily on her nose, but she is startled regardless. You take advantage of her momentary distraction to twine your legs with hers, overbalancing her and the two of you tumble to the floor.

The two of you land hard, but luckily she is on the bottom, and takes the brunt of the fall. You quickly disentangle yourself and take off down the hallway. You feel like you are controlling your limbs from a thousand miles away, but you somehow manage to keep your feet underneath you in your loping, faltering gate. You hear Kanaya calling out for you, and you turn to see the flickering lights as she follows you down the hallway. Unable to watch where you are going, you bump into the wall and tumble to the floor. 

You lay there for several seconds trying to muster the strength to stand again. You listen to the sounds of the meteor. Kanaya's footsteps, rapidly approaching. The ongoing buzz of machines as they recirculate air throughout the interior. The muffled tones of conversation as Dave's speech is followed by Terezi's cackling laughter. The last triggers a vision as you see a sea of red-clad corpses, and in the center your brother crying over the broken, bleeding form of his lover, unable to save her after a million doomed attempts.

It is this last thing that finally gets you moving again. You manage to claw your way up the wall, and leaning heavily on it for support, you stumble onwards. You soon reach a bulkhead, and throw yourself against the giant wheel locking it closed. You slump your weight to the side to get the thing spinning, and then scramble to keep it moving without falling off. Twice around and you hear the hiss of escaping air. Once more and the door blows open to the roaring sound of air being sucked into the vacuum. You pull out one of the Thorns of Oglogoth, you just need to give the meteor a little shove. You point your wand outward and focus what is left of your mind. Thick, oily jets of purple and black flame spew out into space. You think you can feel the rocks tremble under the force of your new engine. You maintain this exertion for mere seconds before your will falters and the wand slips from your hand. You stare numbly as the air whips by you and you watch your tool drift away into the emptiness of the furthest ring.

Suddenly a hand clamps down on your foot and you are dragged back inside. A blur of motion follows and the portal is wrenched shut and closed. And then she is upon you. Holding you. Checking you over for injuries. Speaking to you in worried tone. Fussing over your cheek and the new scrapes and bruises acquired over your recent, desperate attempt to escape.

And looking back into Kanaya's face, one so filled with loving concern for you, you no longer see the well explored paths of a thousand possible deaths, but merely the blank slate of an unknown future stretching before her. You smile as you can feel your consciousness slipping from your grasp. You have never seen anything more beautiful.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And so the timeline is split. Rose, in her drunken stupor, doesn't remember any of it, leaving nobody the wiser.


End file.
